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The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Michelangelo & Titian

January 29, 2026·52 min·4 clips
Michelangelo was blown away when he saw Titian's paintings for the first time in Ferrara at age 55.
The frame is exacting. Green starts with Wallace's Michelangelo and Titian as a book about mutual attention, not a tidy pairing of two masters. The talk moves through church officials, collectors, and intellectuals, but it stays close to objects and the circumstances around them. Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne brings the first jolt in the excerpt. The painting is all color, motion, and mythology suddenly arriving in front of the viewer. Green catches on the leaping, twisting figure, saves it for later, and turns to Alfonso d'Este. Titian's portrait of Alfonso becomes the sharper path back to Michelangelo. That portrait has teeth. Wallace explains that Alfonso stands beside a famous cannon, the kind of object Michelangelo had wanted on loan for Florence and could not have seen innocently. The metal remembers. The cannon was cast from the bronze of Michelangelo's statue of Pope Julius II, a work Wallace describes as deeply unwelcome and short-lived. Its afterlife is almost nasty: a papal image Michelangelo disliked making was pulled down, melted, sold to Alfonso, and remade as a gigantic cannon named La Giulia. The episode likes those collisions. Painting, sculpture, portraiture, weapons, relationships, and pride all start talking to one another, with each object holding more than a single intention. Near the end, Green stretches the timeline to Matisse's 1907 Blue Nude and sees a later triangle with Michelangelo's Night and twentieth-century modernism. Wallace takes the connection dryly. What comes through is influence as address: artists noticing, answering, and sometimes needling one another across medium and time.

As heard by us

A vivid Renaissance art conversation about Michelangelo, Titian, rivalry, patronage, and the charged lives of objects.

Tyler Green's conversation with art historian William E. Wallace frames Michelangelo and Titian as artists watching, answering, and measuring themselves against each other across paintings, sculpture, patrons, and shared circles.

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Why you'd press play

If you want Michelangelo and Titian in the same frame, this is the conversation.

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